The phenomenon of the Out-of-Body
Experience (OBE) or the projection of the consciousness outside the human body
(popularly known as astral travel) is a natural occurrence that human beings
have experienced since ancient times and is currently being researched. Brazil
is in the forefront of this work owing to the efforts of the International
Institute of Projectiology (IIP), an independent, private, non-profit
institution of research and education founded and headed by Waldo Vieira, M.D.,
the progenitor of the sciences of Conscientiology and Projectiology. This
article will explore some of the basic concepts of the new sciences of
Conscientiology and Projectiology, and will introduce the work of the IIP.

Conscientiology and Projectiology:

Two sciences that study the consciousness

Recently proposed in Brazil,
Conscientiology andProjectiology have
been gaining ground internationally as leading-edge non-conventional sciences
which are re-establishing the study of consciousness within the context of
science.Science discarded the concept
of the consciousness approximately 300 years ago, when it embraced the
materialist-reductionist-newtonian-cartesian-physicalist paradigm - now
recognized by many as out-dated. Conscientiology and Projectiology offer the
consciential paradigm as the inevitable contemporary successor.

Conscientiology, as theword indicates, studies the consciousness
and all of its attributes and manifestations, and analyzes it in the most
systematic way possible. Conscientiology offers a more comprehensive approach
than Psychology, for example, as it extends its investigations beyond the
boundaries of physical manifestation, addressing such areas as the
classification of evolutive levels, consciential types, the cosmoethic (the
extraphysical ethic) and strategies for the attainment of consciential maturity
and serenity.

While the approach of
Conscientiology is a broad one, Projectiology focuses on the practical
application of interdimensional phenomena. The overlying objective of
Projectiology is the study of the consciousness in its various degrees of
discoincidence (discoincidence being the condition of the partial or full
projection of the consciousness from the human body in one or more of its vehicles).

Projectiology defends the hypothesis
of the objective body which holds that conscious projection (CP) is a
manifestation of the consciousness outside of the physical body achieved
through the utilization of a subtle, but real, body (the psychosoma, or astral
body), and is not a mereoniric (dream)
activity related to dreams and hallucinations, as is argued by many researchers
who are not conscious projectors. Projectiology studies the constitution and mechanisms
of the holosoma (the four vehicles of the consciousness - the soma or human body, the holochakra or etheric double, the psychosoma or astral body and the mentalsoma or mental body - when
considered as a whole).

Projectiology considers conscious
projection to be a natural phenomenon. Accounts of this experiencehave been recorded by persons from all walks
of life for thousands of years. What the new methods and techniques of
Projectiology seek to do is to put thephenomenon under the voluntary control of the experiencer, thus developing
the ability of the individual projector to remain lucid during the experience
(extraphysical lucidity), to reach various chosen extraphysical objectives, and
to remember the experience afterwards (physicalrecall).The mastering
ofone's projectability allows the
individual to utilize, over many physical (intraphysical) lives, that one-third
of his or her life which is, from a consciential point of view,wasted during sleep.